


pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag

by halfmoonsevenstars



Category: Captain America (Movies), Wonder Woman (2017)
Genre: AU (sort of?), Crossover, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-08
Updated: 2017-06-08
Packaged: 2018-11-10 19:08:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11132916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halfmoonsevenstars/pseuds/halfmoonsevenstars
Summary: Joe Rogers still tells stories, but only to one person.





	pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag

When Joe Rogers came back to Brooklyn, he didn’t talk too much on account of how the mustard gas had torn up his lungs so bad in Belgium. It was a shame, the neighborhood agreed, because Joe’s stories were always the best—as if he’d been blessed by Saint Luke himself, some said. Now, when he did talk, he kept his sentences short and clipped, his soft Belfast accent clogged with phlegm and sorrow.

He never talked about the war.

He didn’t have to.

And nobody ever asked.

They didn’t need to.

But Sarah knew that he still told stories, because she could hear him late at night when Joe thought she was asleep, pacing up and down the narrow hallway with Steven in his arms. Joe told him a new one each night, it seemed. It didn’t seem to matter to him that their son tended to fall asleep just as Joe was getting to the good part, or that he couldn’t really understand what his pa was about anyway, being just under a year old.

It was a sweltering night in June and they’d thrown open all the doors and windows in a vain effort to catch the breeze, and from what Sarah could hear whenever Joe and Steven got near the bedroom, tonight’s story was something about the last full day of the war—how it had snowed the night before.

“It was as though someone had a paintbrush and went over the whole land, just made it clean and bright all over again, the way it ought to be,” Joe said. “And don’t you know, Stevie, the next day an angel came? She went right over the top, where they said no man could live.”

Sarah smiled at that—Joe had been nowhere near the front on November 10; he’d already been sent to a stateside hospital to recuperate—and turned over to try and find a cool spot on the pillow, but failed.

“The Germans shot at her with their carbines and their machine guns, but they couldn’t touch her. The angel—she stood her ground. They pushed, she pushed back. She dug her boots into the mud and held them off with only a shield made of bronze until all of their bullets were spent,” Joe continued, his voice fading from her earshot as he walked Steven back down the hallway toward the kitchenette.

“But you know what, son?” Joe whispered to his sleeping son, although he was looking out the window at Manhattan’s skyline instead. “Truth be told, she didn’t need that shield at all. She _was_ the shield.”

Captain Trevor had said so himself, right there from the bed next to Joe’s at Fort McHenry.

**Author's Note:**

> And now you see why it's sort of an AU. ;) I did a little fudging to make it work, timeline-wise.
> 
> "Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit-Bag (and Smile, Smile, Smile!)" was a popular song during World War One, and I liked the sound of it.
> 
> Fort McHenry in Baltimore did indeed serve as a military hospital during WWI! I've been dying to use that fact somehow.


End file.
